2,000 More User Accounts Hacked From Sony Ericsson Canadian Site

The Sony PR mess continues. Just yesterday, we reported that Sony Music Greece and Sony Music Japan had been hacked and over 8500 accounts had been compromised. Today was Sony Ericsson’s turn, which saw its Canadian sShop website broken into, as 2,000 usernames, email addresses and hashed passwords made their way onto the web.

Sony Ericsson’s eShop website was clearly taken down, but the damage has already been done: the information quickly made its way onto pastebin.com, along with information on how the hack was performed, apparently through an SQL injection, similarly to the Sony Music hack earlier this week. We won’t post a link to the leaked details here out of respect for the users involved, and for their security.

If you’ve heard about other Sony attacks, you’d be right: they’ve been coming in from everywhere. Last month, PlayStation Network was taken down after credit card information, as well as names, addresses and passwords were leaked onto the web. Hacks to the PlayStation network happened several times ever since, bringing the service down to a halt.

Earlier this month, attacks started happening on more of Sony’s properties. Last week, we reported that a vulnerability PlayStation’s password reset tools, which are used by many PlayStation-owned sites, such as the PlayStation blog and even official websites of specific gaming titles. The ability to log in or register into one of those sites was quickly disabled for patching, and brought back up hours after. In that same week, Sony’s Thailand site was found to be hosting a live phishing site targeting customers of an Italian bank. The scam site was still accessible hours after the alarm was first sounded.

What was first seen as an unfortunate one-time occurrence has now become an embarrassment for the company, and almost laughing stock for some people (definitely not the affected users, however). One by one, many of Sony’s properties are being hit, which either points to terribly bad luck or a terrible security infrastructure.

Sony Ericsson is a joint venture between Tokyo-based Sony and Stockholm-based telecommunications company Ericsson. The company was started with the purpose of combining Sony’s advanced knowledge and experience in creating consumer electronics with Ericsson’s expertise in the telecommunication sector. One of the company’s newest products is the Xperia Play, an Android-based smartphone that is capable of running PSP games.